Yvain had what I thought was a very thorough discussion in the original thread. If you’re unhappy with that, I don’t think there’s really anything to say but I’m sorry. Because we’re not going to get any better data—realistically, any survey you conduct isn’t going to get the response rate that the general census did, especially when your tests are going to take a long time. Furthermore, I have no faith that your tests are any better than the one that was given in the census. Lastly, the correlations with SAT and ACT have settled the question to what I feel is a reasonable degree of accuracy, and sitting around talking about how smart we are doesn’t send signals to onlookers that I think are in the best interests of LessWrong.
What’s wrong about talking about how smart we are?
Given a large group of people, so far out on the tail end of a distribution for a particular quality, who didn’t purposefully get together to talk about that quality, it would be stupid of us not to talk about this. We talk about our issues with akrasia. Why not talk about our issues with intelligence?
“It’s sends a bad signal.” Does it? Or is there a widespread prejudice against acknowledging your own intelligence? If this were height or weight, there’d be absolutely no issue about talking about it. But once it is intelligence, people get all weird about it.
I think you’ve motivated me to start a thread or two.
What’s wrong about talking about how smart we are?
There is a widespread prejudice against acknowledging your own intelligence.
“It’s sends a bad signal.” Does it? Or is there a widespread prejudice against acknowledging your own intelligence?
Oh. You already knew that. Yes, it does send a bad signal, and it sends such a signal precisely because there is such a prejudice. Normatively, the prejudice seems like a bad idea, but descriptively, such a prejudice exists and it would be foolish to violate it.
I think you’ve motivated me to start a thread or two.
I expect you’ll get downvoted; this thread is only tangentially related to discussing our intelligence (in that collecting empirical evidence is fairly noble) and it’s at −3 at time of posting.
Does this prejudice empower us, or disempower us? Does bending to it empower us, or disempower us?
Taboo “empower”. What are the short-term and long-term consequences of accepting or breaking this prejudice? And what is your certainly about your predictions about this?
I submit that kowtowing to irrational prejudice is prima facie undesirable. If you have an argument why it produces net desirable short and long term consequences in general, or in this case, do tell.
I think the prejudice exists for a reason, and the reason is this:
Intelligence, in general, correlates positively with success at life. However, speaking about one’s own intelligence correlates negatively with success at life.
Of course there are many situations where this rule is misapplied. There is a difference when someone asks me about my IQ and as a matter of fact I say a number; and when I come into a room saying: “hey guys, let’s talk about IQ and about how the world should worship the most intelligent people… and by the way, my IQ is XYZ”. Yet, a careless observer may evaluate the first situation as the second one. Especially on the community forum where LessWrongers ask LessWrongers about their IQ—if you see us as individuals, it is more like the first case, but if an outsider sees us as a community, it is more like the second case. The problem is not LessWrongers talking about their IQs, the problem is LessWrongers asking. Especially asking repeatedly in a short time frame.
The data you gathered here will be highly unreliable. First, it’s self-reporting. What prevents me from taking the test, getting result 90 points, and reporting 190? Nothing. Second, self-sampling. Who is more likely to take the test: readers who usually get high values on IQ tests, or readers who usually get low values. Third, just the idea of an online IQ test makes me shiver—the internet is full with fraudulent tests, or tests made by mentally unbalanced people with almost zero knowledge of psychometrics—and the tests that pretends to reliably measure values above the usual IQ tests are very unlikely to be methodologically correct. It is about statistics: If you want to speak e.g. about “1 in 1000” intelligence level, you better callibrate your test on a few thousand randomly selected people. How likely are they to fill your test seriously, unless you pay them? How much is paying them going to cost you? How likely are you then to provide the resulting test and calibration online for free?
So the consequences of our breaking this prejudice will be 1) gathering data with almost zero reliability, and 2) looking like IQ-obsessed losers to outsider. I see nothing empowering in that.
If we are going to break a prejudice, at least let’s make in a way that makes sense. If we are going to publish a result that e.g. 70% of LW readers have IQ above 130, and 20% are above 150, let’s use a methodology a former psychology student would not find obviously flawed.
“How intelligent LW users are, as a population” … not so much. What insight would we get from discussing it more?
We talk about our issues with akrasia because lots of LW users think that they (and others) achieve a lot less than they could because of akrasia and that a better understanding of akrasia might help to fix this. What comparable “issues with intelligence” do we have?
What comparable “issues with intelligence” do we have?
How would we know, unless we compared notes?
Maybe we could achieve a lot more if we found better ways to leverage the advantages and avoid the disadvantages of high intelligence. Found careers and social contexts where it was a greater advantage, and avoided those where it was less of an advantage, or a handicap. Found ways to deal with education institutions geared to the common denominator.
If nothing else, it might be an interesting to discuss why people get so weird about intelligence, per this thread. There wouldn’t be a question about having a similar discussion for any other generally useful ability.
But none of these things is a matter of talking about how clever we are; they’re about talking about what to do with our cleverness. The thing a bunch of people are skeptical about the value of is yet another attempt to quantify exactly how smart LW’s population is (according to some particular numerical measure of some particular kinds of smartness), which is not at all the same thing.
This is a very fair point. I guess I tend to see any numerical discussion of IQ as trying to figure out exactly how much smarter than average we are. I don’t think that’s a particularly relevant discussion to have, and I think it is pretty obvious to any casual observer that we tend to be above average.
It’s a perfectly legitimate dismissal. People talking about how awesome they are has well known spiral qualities, and isn’t that useful. As with the start of this comment chain: The burden of why we should talk about this is on people who think we should, as the reasons why we shouldn’t are obvious: It doesn’t appear to serve any use and is at risk of becoming nothing more than backpatting.
Mistake 2 - It’s useless to talk about a trait that makes you “awesome”.
Discussing how to capitalize on a positive trait seems quite useful to me, and the more “awesome” the trait, the more potential mileage of exchanging information on how to exploit it. It’s a trait where we have a comparative advantage (and some disadvantages) far out on the tail of the distribution. It’s stupid not to discuss it in the rare circumstance where we have a large sample size far out on the tail of the distribution, just where we need the data.
I think discussions of how to capitalize on intelligence might be interesting and worth while. That’s got nothing much to do with discussing what the actual statistical distribution of IQ is among the LW population; all that needs saying about that is that it turns out that LW has quite a lot of high-IQ people.
(What would be said in a discussion of how to capitalize on IQ-style intelligence? Non-obvious careers in which such intelligence turns out to be highly advantageous. Typical weaknesses that accompany high IQ, and how to use abilities that correlate with IQ to overcome them. Classes of problems that turn out to submit more or less readily than you’d expect to the kinds of thinking that high-IQ people are good at. I don’t know whether any of this would be unobvious enough to be worth it, but it seems at least an order of magnitude more productive than yet another Oh Grandmother, What A Big IQ You Have discussion.)
I think discussions of how to capitalize on intelligence might be interesting and worth while.
So do I.
But “Quite a lot of high-IQ people” strikes me as vague to the point of useless. The real distribution matters. Numbers matter. Being top 50% is different than being top 10% is different than being top 0.1%. The value of our population as a data sample is dependent on how rare the sample is. How we might capitalize would also depend on the numbers.
I don’t know whether any of this would be unobvious enough to be worth it
IMO, a particular weakness of the very intelligent is behaving as if reality is obvious and rational, something that one can figure out, instead of something that will surprise you if you take the time to actually look at it, or ask other people about.
yet another Oh Grandmother, What A Big IQ You Have discussion.
I guess I missed the “who’s got the biggest swinging IQ” discussions. Have you really had a lot of those? That does sound tiresome.
I’m more interested costs/benefits, and making the most of what should be an asset.
How we might capitalize would also depend on the numbers.
How, specifically, would it depend on the numbers? What are the important differences in the type of content we would want to encourage if the average IQ were 140 as opposed to if it were 130?
How we might capitalize would also depend on the numbers.
How any given person capitalizes on their mental powers will depend on just what those mental powers are. But it seems pretty clear to me that there’s much more variation between different LWers than there is uncertainty in just where the average is. (From what I’ve seen it seems pretty much certain that for most measures of IQ, (1) the average among active LWers is somewhere between 120 and 140 and (2) the range is at least ~120 to ~160.)
What discussions would we have that would need to be much different depending on whether the average IQ here is 120 or 140, but that wouldn’t end up being useless for most of LW in either case?
And suppose we nail down very accurately what the average IQ here is by some particular measure. That still won’t tell us much, because whatever you may say about g there’s plenty of variation in how smart people are smart.
I guess I missed the “who’s got the biggest swinging IQ” discussions.
That isn’t what I meant; sorry if I was unclear. I was intending to cover “who’s got the biggest IQ”, “what is our average IQ”, “how much does our IQ vary”, and basically the whole range of discussions that are about characterizing LW IQ measurements. I just don’t see that there’s much value to those discussions beyond the level (which we’ve already reached) of observing that the LW population is at least one or two standard deviations smarter than average according to typical IQ measures, because anything that would be invalidated by not having more precise knowledge of the LW population average is equally invalidated by the fact that the average is only an average and actual LWers are different in many different directions.
(1) the average among active LWers is somewhere between 120 and 140
The OP referred to the SAT/ACT score averages as 0.11%, giving 3sigma+, while the IQ numbers averages I saw were 140 to 146, being almost 3sigma.
Certainly this data set isn’t equally useful to everyone, but I think significantly useful to many. It depends on how significant intelligence level is in life. Out at 3sigma and beyond, I’d think pretty significant. I wouldn’t expect that estimate to be universal, but I would expect it to get at least a good plurality.
OK, so “between 120 and 140” was on the low side. That’s not the point; the point is that whatever measure you pick, the remaining uncertainty about the mean is less than the known variation between people.
You are either not understanding, or not wanting to understand, the difference between the score on a reliable IQ test and the SAT scores of just the LWers who took a SAT. Obviously, an IQ test is a much better indicator, also SAT is only available for people in the US. Also, the responses I’m getting are already very different from the survey.
JCTI’s reliability is verifiable from the link, even though the other test’s is not.
sitting around talking about how smart we are doesn’t send signals to onlookers that I think are in the best interests of LessWrong.
Investigating a phenomena is what we are about. I don’t see a logically valid reason to not investigate this one, especially if previous data suggests an abnormally high level. This holds true even if the concept of IQ is invalid, as long as it is measurable.
I agree with your overall point, though it’s worth pointing out that the best (i.e. most g-loaded) IQ tests, such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices and WAIS, have higher g loadings than the SAT.
I think this topic has pretty effectively been beaten to death already. What is the endgame of this discussion?
I couldn’t find any relevant discussion on the topic. Can anyone give me a link?
I’m looking for one where people have posted their scores on a reliable IQ test, rather than answering to the question “what is your IQ?”.
Yvain had what I thought was a very thorough discussion in the original thread. If you’re unhappy with that, I don’t think there’s really anything to say but I’m sorry. Because we’re not going to get any better data—realistically, any survey you conduct isn’t going to get the response rate that the general census did, especially when your tests are going to take a long time. Furthermore, I have no faith that your tests are any better than the one that was given in the census. Lastly, the correlations with SAT and ACT have settled the question to what I feel is a reasonable degree of accuracy, and sitting around talking about how smart we are doesn’t send signals to onlookers that I think are in the best interests of LessWrong.
What’s wrong about talking about how smart we are?
Given a large group of people, so far out on the tail end of a distribution for a particular quality, who didn’t purposefully get together to talk about that quality, it would be stupid of us not to talk about this. We talk about our issues with akrasia. Why not talk about our issues with intelligence?
“It’s sends a bad signal.” Does it? Or is there a widespread prejudice against acknowledging your own intelligence? If this were height or weight, there’d be absolutely no issue about talking about it. But once it is intelligence, people get all weird about it.
I think you’ve motivated me to start a thread or two.
There is a widespread prejudice against acknowledging your own intelligence.
Oh. You already knew that. Yes, it does send a bad signal, and it sends such a signal precisely because there is such a prejudice. Normatively, the prejudice seems like a bad idea, but descriptively, such a prejudice exists and it would be foolish to violate it.
I expect you’ll get downvoted; this thread is only tangentially related to discussing our intelligence (in that collecting empirical evidence is fairly noble) and it’s at −3 at time of posting.
You think it’s better to send a signal that we consciously kowtow to irrational prejudice against us?
Does this prejudice empower us, or disempower us? Does bending to it empower us, or disempower us?
Being right where the prevailing prejudice is wrong is exactly the kind of signal I often like to send—it attracts the right kind of people.
Taboo “empower”. What are the short-term and long-term consequences of accepting or breaking this prejudice? And what is your certainly about your predictions about this?
I asked first.
I submit that kowtowing to irrational prejudice is prima facie undesirable. If you have an argument why it produces net desirable short and long term consequences in general, or in this case, do tell.
I think the prejudice exists for a reason, and the reason is this:
Intelligence, in general, correlates positively with success at life. However, speaking about one’s own intelligence correlates negatively with success at life.
Of course there are many situations where this rule is misapplied. There is a difference when someone asks me about my IQ and as a matter of fact I say a number; and when I come into a room saying: “hey guys, let’s talk about IQ and about how the world should worship the most intelligent people… and by the way, my IQ is XYZ”. Yet, a careless observer may evaluate the first situation as the second one. Especially on the community forum where LessWrongers ask LessWrongers about their IQ—if you see us as individuals, it is more like the first case, but if an outsider sees us as a community, it is more like the second case. The problem is not LessWrongers talking about their IQs, the problem is LessWrongers asking. Especially asking repeatedly in a short time frame.
The data you gathered here will be highly unreliable. First, it’s self-reporting. What prevents me from taking the test, getting result 90 points, and reporting 190? Nothing. Second, self-sampling. Who is more likely to take the test: readers who usually get high values on IQ tests, or readers who usually get low values. Third, just the idea of an online IQ test makes me shiver—the internet is full with fraudulent tests, or tests made by mentally unbalanced people with almost zero knowledge of psychometrics—and the tests that pretends to reliably measure values above the usual IQ tests are very unlikely to be methodologically correct. It is about statistics: If you want to speak e.g. about “1 in 1000” intelligence level, you better callibrate your test on a few thousand randomly selected people. How likely are they to fill your test seriously, unless you pay them? How much is paying them going to cost you? How likely are you then to provide the resulting test and calibration online for free?
So the consequences of our breaking this prejudice will be 1) gathering data with almost zero reliability, and 2) looking like IQ-obsessed losers to outsider. I see nothing empowering in that.
If we are going to break a prejudice, at least let’s make in a way that makes sense. If we are going to publish a result that e.g. 70% of LW readers have IQ above 130, and 20% are above 150, let’s use a methodology a former psychology student would not find obviously flawed.
“Intelligence” is an interesting topic.
“How intelligent LW users are, as a population” … not so much. What insight would we get from discussing it more?
We talk about our issues with akrasia because lots of LW users think that they (and others) achieve a lot less than they could because of akrasia and that a better understanding of akrasia might help to fix this. What comparable “issues with intelligence” do we have?
How would we know, unless we compared notes?
Maybe we could achieve a lot more if we found better ways to leverage the advantages and avoid the disadvantages of high intelligence. Found careers and social contexts where it was a greater advantage, and avoided those where it was less of an advantage, or a handicap. Found ways to deal with education institutions geared to the common denominator.
If nothing else, it might be an interesting to discuss why people get so weird about intelligence, per this thread. There wouldn’t be a question about having a similar discussion for any other generally useful ability.
But none of these things is a matter of talking about how clever we are; they’re about talking about what to do with our cleverness. The thing a bunch of people are skeptical about the value of is yet another attempt to quantify exactly how smart LW’s population is (according to some particular numerical measure of some particular kinds of smartness), which is not at all the same thing.
Because I would rather us not turn into Reddit. r/circlejerk exists for a reason.
This would be a much more cogent objection if the OP were not looking at these IQ figures, raising an eyebrow, and saying ‘ORLY’?
This is a very fair point. I guess I tend to see any numerical discussion of IQ as trying to figure out exactly how much smarter than average we are. I don’t think that’s a particularly relevant discussion to have, and I think it is pretty obvious to any casual observer that we tend to be above average.
That’s not a serious comment; it’s cheap and thoughtless dismissal, a common tactic among those defending untenable positions.
Are you personally unable to discuss intelligence with others without it turning into a circle jerk? Is it everyone here but you?
I have said all I wish to on this topic and others are expressing any points I would make. I am now tapping out.
It’s a perfectly legitimate dismissal. People talking about how awesome they are has well known spiral qualities, and isn’t that useful. As with the start of this comment chain: The burden of why we should talk about this is on people who think we should, as the reasons why we shouldn’t are obvious: It doesn’t appear to serve any use and is at risk of becoming nothing more than backpatting.
Mistake 1 - I am intelligent = I am awesome.
Mistake 2 - It’s useless to talk about a trait that makes you “awesome”.
Discussing how to capitalize on a positive trait seems quite useful to me, and the more “awesome” the trait, the more potential mileage of exchanging information on how to exploit it. It’s a trait where we have a comparative advantage (and some disadvantages) far out on the tail of the distribution. It’s stupid not to discuss it in the rare circumstance where we have a large sample size far out on the tail of the distribution, just where we need the data.
I think discussions of how to capitalize on intelligence might be interesting and worth while. That’s got nothing much to do with discussing what the actual statistical distribution of IQ is among the LW population; all that needs saying about that is that it turns out that LW has quite a lot of high-IQ people.
(What would be said in a discussion of how to capitalize on IQ-style intelligence? Non-obvious careers in which such intelligence turns out to be highly advantageous. Typical weaknesses that accompany high IQ, and how to use abilities that correlate with IQ to overcome them. Classes of problems that turn out to submit more or less readily than you’d expect to the kinds of thinking that high-IQ people are good at. I don’t know whether any of this would be unobvious enough to be worth it, but it seems at least an order of magnitude more productive than yet another Oh Grandmother, What A Big IQ You Have discussion.)
So do I.
But “Quite a lot of high-IQ people” strikes me as vague to the point of useless. The real distribution matters. Numbers matter. Being top 50% is different than being top 10% is different than being top 0.1%. The value of our population as a data sample is dependent on how rare the sample is. How we might capitalize would also depend on the numbers.
IMO, a particular weakness of the very intelligent is behaving as if reality is obvious and rational, something that one can figure out, instead of something that will surprise you if you take the time to actually look at it, or ask other people about.
I guess I missed the “who’s got the biggest swinging IQ” discussions. Have you really had a lot of those? That does sound tiresome.
I’m more interested costs/benefits, and making the most of what should be an asset.
How, specifically, would it depend on the numbers? What are the important differences in the type of content we would want to encourage if the average IQ were 140 as opposed to if it were 130?
How any given person capitalizes on their mental powers will depend on just what those mental powers are. But it seems pretty clear to me that there’s much more variation between different LWers than there is uncertainty in just where the average is. (From what I’ve seen it seems pretty much certain that for most measures of IQ, (1) the average among active LWers is somewhere between 120 and 140 and (2) the range is at least ~120 to ~160.)
What discussions would we have that would need to be much different depending on whether the average IQ here is 120 or 140, but that wouldn’t end up being useless for most of LW in either case?
And suppose we nail down very accurately what the average IQ here is by some particular measure. That still won’t tell us much, because whatever you may say about g there’s plenty of variation in how smart people are smart.
That isn’t what I meant; sorry if I was unclear. I was intending to cover “who’s got the biggest IQ”, “what is our average IQ”, “how much does our IQ vary”, and basically the whole range of discussions that are about characterizing LW IQ measurements. I just don’t see that there’s much value to those discussions beyond the level (which we’ve already reached) of observing that the LW population is at least one or two standard deviations smarter than average according to typical IQ measures, because anything that would be invalidated by not having more precise knowledge of the LW population average is equally invalidated by the fact that the average is only an average and actual LWers are different in many different directions.
The OP referred to the SAT/ACT score averages as 0.11%, giving 3sigma+, while the IQ numbers averages I saw were 140 to 146, being almost 3sigma.
Certainly this data set isn’t equally useful to everyone, but I think significantly useful to many. It depends on how significant intelligence level is in life. Out at 3sigma and beyond, I’d think pretty significant. I wouldn’t expect that estimate to be universal, but I would expect it to get at least a good plurality.
OK, so “between 120 and 140” was on the low side. That’s not the point; the point is that whatever measure you pick, the remaining uncertainty about the mean is less than the known variation between people.
A = “Defending an untenable position”
B = “Gives a cheap and thoughtless dismissal”
p(A|B) ~= P(B|A). In fact, I’m not sure that P(B|A) > P(B|~A).
You are either not understanding, or not wanting to understand, the difference between the score on a reliable IQ test and the SAT scores of just the LWers who took a SAT. Obviously, an IQ test is a much better indicator, also SAT is only available for people in the US. Also, the responses I’m getting are already very different from the survey.
JCTI’s reliability is verifiable from the link, even though the other test’s is not.
Investigating a phenomena is what we are about. I don’t see a logically valid reason to not investigate this one, especially if previous data suggests an abnormally high level. This holds true even if the concept of IQ is invalid, as long as it is measurable.
I have said all I wish to on this topic and others are expressing any points I would make. I am now tapping out.
I don’t think that’s true. It’s my impression that the SAT correlates with IQ tests about as much as IQ tests correlate with each other.
On IQ and SAT correlations:
Meanwhile, the correlation between the Stanford-Binet test and Raven’s is about .72.
I agree with your overall point, though it’s worth pointing out that the best (i.e. most g-loaded) IQ tests, such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices and WAIS, have higher g loadings than the SAT.